The Ethnic Makeup of Pickup Basketball:

Ethnic Fragmentation on the Basketball Courts

This section explores the ethnic component of the pickup games. First I will follow Rebekah Nathan's (2005) model of documenting the ethnic makeup of lunch groups in My Freshman Year. I use emic categories for ethnicity, categories that were commuinicated to me by the players themselves int he unstructured interviews. These categories are also similar to those used by the university to record the ethnic makeup of their student population, however to stick with the language of the informants, I use "black" instead of "African-American." I excercise caution in my use of ethnic typologies and by no means imply that all individuals that I assumed to be associated with one category possess the same qualities, interests, or characetristics. In general, I observed that students tend to play with other students of the same ethnicity. While the sample below is not random and is not statistically significant. it will show how I arrived to this conclusion.

The following data records the total number of people in the space of the pickup basketball courts. Some may be playing, some may be sitting down waiting for the game to end, and others may be shooting baskets by themselves or with their friends but not engaging in competitive play. Note that I recorded both men and women, so if a white woman was on the court, she was counted in the white category.

The quantitative data, in the forms of two charts, as well as a brief analysis can be found here. It is a word document.

Dworkin and Wachs, in their review of existing literature, note that "African Americans historically have been framed by the media as being 'closer to nature.' Within sport, African American athletes are assumed to be 'natural' athletes, whereas white men are praised for their intelligence and hard work" (Dworkin and Wachs 2000: 49). This notion is reproduced in the discourse of the student players with whom I conducted interviews. For example, I asked one informant to explain the difference between playing at the Rolfs gym and playing at the Rockne gym. He explained that the difference was in level of play, that at Rolfs the level of play is significantly higher than at Rockne. This was attributed to the fact that "more Black kids are at Rolfs than Rock." He also said that "Black kids are cockier. They take more shots, but they are naturally better so its OK." Two things are striking about this quote. First, the speaker reproduces a narrative about black basketball players that he has probably been exposed to in the sports media and then applies it to his African American peers. Second, the speakers application of the narrative of Black basketball players as naturally good speaks to the ethnic fragmentation endemic to the Notre Dame community.